In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage

Joseph Epstein has been called America’s “liveliest, most erudite and engaging essayist” (James Atlas), and In a Cardboard Belt! provides ample proof for the claim. Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great Max Bialystock in The Producers -- “Look at me now! Look at me now! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” -- Epstein gives us his largest and most comprehensive collection to date.

Writing as a memoirist, polemicist, literary critic, and amused observer of contemporary culture, he uses to deft and devastating effect his signature gifts: wide-ranging erudition, sparkling humor, and a penetrating intelligence. In personally revealing essays about his father and about his years as a teacher, in deeply considered examinations of writers from Paul Valery to Truman Capote, and in incisive take-downs of such cultural pooh-bahs as Harold Bloom and George Steiner, this remarkable collection presents us with the best work of our country’s most singular talent, engaged with the richness and variety of life, witty in his response to the world, and always entertaining.

Oh Dad, Dear Dad

It will soon be seven years since my father died, leaving me, at a mere sixty- two, orphaned. He was ninety-one when he died, in his sleep, in his own apartment in Chicago. Such was the relentlessness of his vigor that, until his last year, I referred to him behind his back as the Energizer Bunny: he just kept going. I used to joke—half joke is closer to it—about “the vague possibility” that he would predecease me. Now he has done it, and his absence, even today, takes getting used to.
When an aged parent dies, one’s feelings are greatly mixed. I was relieved that my father had what seems to have been an easeful death. In truth, I was also relieved at not having to worry about him any longer (though, apart from running a few errands and keeping his checkbook in the last few years of his life, he really gave my wife and me very little to worry about). But with him dead, I have been made acutely conscious that I am next in line for the guillotine: C’est, as Pascal would have it, la condition humaine.
Now that my father is gone, many questions will never be answered. Not long before he died I was driving him to his accountant’s office and, without any transition, he said, “I wanted a third child, but your mother wasn’t interested.” This was the first I had heard about it. He was never a very engaged parent, certainly not by the full-court-press standards of today. Having had two sons—me and my younger brother—had he, I suddenly wondered, begun to yearn for a daughter?
“Why wasn’t Mother interested?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” he said. Subject closed.
On another of our drives in that last year, he asked me if I had anything in the works in the way of business. I told him I had been invited to give a lecture in Philadelphia. He inquired if there was a fee. I said there was: $5,000.
“For an hour’s talk?” he said, a look of astonishment on his face.
“Fifty minutes, actually,” I said, unable to resist provoking him lightly. His look changed from astonishment to bitter certainty. The country had to be in one hell of a sorry condition if they were passing out that kind of dough for mere talk from his son.
Was he, then, a good father? This was the question an acquaintance put to me at lunch recently. When I asked what he meant by good, he said: “Was he, for example, fair?” My father was completely fair, never showing the least favoritism between my brother and me (a judgment my brother has con- firmed). He also set an example of decency, nicely qualified by realism. “No one is asking you to be an angel in this world,” he told me when I was fourteen, “but that doesn’t give you warrant to be a son-of-a-bitch.” And, as this suggests, he was an unrelenting fount of advice, some of it pretty obvious, none of it stupid. “Always put something by for a rainy day.” “People know more about you than you think.” “Work for a man for a dollar an hour—always give him a dollar and a quarter’s effort.” Some of his advice seemed wildly misplaced. “Next to your brother, money’s your best friend” was a remark made all the more unconvincing by the fact that my brother and I, nearly six years apart in age, were never that close to begin with. On the subject of sex, the full extent of his wisdom was “Be careful.” Of what, exactly, I was to be careful—venereal disease? pregnancy? getting entangled with the wrong girl?—he never filled in.
My father and I spent a lot of time together when I was an adolescent. He manufactured and imported costume jewelry (also known as junk jewelry) and novelties—identification bracelets, cigarette lighters, miniature cameras, bolo ties—which he sold to Woolworth’s, to the International Shoe Company, to banks, and to concessionaires at state fairs. I traveled with him in the summer, spelling him at the wheel of his Buicks and Oldsmobiles, toting his sample cases, writing up orders, listening to him tell—ad infinitum, ad nauseam—the same three or four jokes to customers. We shared rooms in less-than-first-class hotels in midwestern towns—Des Moines, Minneapolis, Columbus—but never achieved anything close to intimacy, at least in our conversation. His commercial advice was as useful as his advice about sex. “Always keep a low overhead.” “You make your money in buying right, you know, not in selling.” “Never run away from business.” Some of it has stuck; nearly a half century later, I still find it hard to turn down a writing assignment lest I prove guilty of running away from business.
My least favorite of his maxims was “You can’t argue with success.” In my growing-up days, I thought there was nothing better to argue with. I tried to tell him why, but I never seemed to get my point across. The only time our argumentts ever got close to the shouting stage was over the question of whether or not federal budgets had to be balanced. I was then in my twentiiiiies, and our ignorance on this question was equal and mutual— though he turned out to be right: all things considered, balanced is better.

When not in his homiletic mode, my father could be very penetrating. “There are three ways to do business in this country,” he once told me. “At the top level, you rely heavily on national advertising and public relations. At the next level, you take people out to dinner or golfing, you buy them theater tickets, supply women. And then there’s my level.” Pause. Asked what went on there, he replied: “I cut prices.” His level, I thought then and still think, was much the most honorable.
He appreciated jokes, although in telling them he could not sustain even a brief narrative. His own best wit entailed a comic resignation. In his late eighties, he made the mistake of sending to a great-nephew whom he had never met a bar mitzvah check for $1,000, instead of the $100 he had intended. When I discovered the error and pointed it out to him, he paused only briefly, smiled, and said, “Boy, is his younger brother going to be disappointed.” Work was the place where my father seemed most alive, most impressive. Born in Montreal and having never finished high school, he came to America at seventeen, not long before the Depression. He took various flunky jobs, but soon found his niche as a salesman. “Kid,” one of his bosses once told him, so good was he at his work, “try to remember that this desk I’m sitting behind is not for sale.” Eventually, he owned his own small business.
He worked six days a week, usually arriving at 7:30 a.m. If he could find some excuse to go down to work on Sunday, he was delighted to do so. On his rare vacations, he would call in two or three times a day to find out what was in the mail, who telephoned, what deliveries arrived.
He never had more than seven or eight employees, but the business was fairly lucrative. In the late 1960s I recall him saying to me, “The country must be in terrible shape. You should see the crap I’m selling.” In later years, a nephew worked for him; neither my brother nor I ever seriously thought about joining the business, sensing that it was a one-man show, without sufficient oxygen for two. One day, after he had had a falling-out with this nephew, my father said to me, “He’s worked for me for fifteen years. We open at eight-thirty, and for fifteen years he has come in at exactly eight- thirty. You’d think once—just once—the

JOSEPH EPSTEIN is the author of the best-selling Snobbery and of Friendship, among other books, and was formerly editor of the American Scholar. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Epstein's (Snobbery: The American Version ) description of Truman Capote as "gayer than a leap year Mardi Gras" is just one of the sly remarks setting the tone for this collection of 31 essays and reflections. In "Goodbye, Mr. Chipstein," a story about the 30 years he spent teaching English and writing at Northwestern University, Epstein reveals how his students taught him nothing but reminded him of the "surprise of human possibility." He discusses restaurants in "Memoirs of a Cheap and Finicky Glutton" and pays homage to the unnamed creator of the BLT sandwich, all the while explaining his dislike of overly friendly waiters. He also covers literature in several entries, e.g., with his dismissal of the Great Books clubs and his thoughts on how refusing the position of poet laureate of the United States is the only way to be recognized in association with that position. In the end, it is Epstein's introductory comments on turning 70 that mark the entire work: Epstein shuns literary honors and states he just wants to be remembered as a good writer by thoughtful people. And so it is. Recommended for academic library literary collections.—Joyce Sparrow, JWB Children's Services Council, Pinellas Park, FL

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Life is not easy for me being a snob and a reverse snob simultaneously," writes Epstein (Friendship ) in this engaging, irascible collection. The longtime editor of the American Scholar is indeed omnidirectional in his disdain—"nature was overrated," he sniffs while driving through the Pacific Northwest—but some targets get extra attention. Chief among them are allegedly overrated intellectuals like Mortimer Adler (a "clown savant" with a "coarse and deeply vulgar mind"), Edmund Wilson ("a bald, pudgy little man with a drinking problem, a nearly perpetual erection and a mean streak") and Harold Bloom ("nearly perfect unreadability"). Modern America is condemned for its "perpetual adolescence" and aversion to Henry James. And the feminists, Marxists, queer theorists and other "hacks" running the Modern Language Association are lashed for replacing literary aesthetics with trendy politics in university English departments (a critique that is stated more than shown). Epstein goes easier on actual (and dead) producers of literature in appreciative essays on Keats, Proust, Truman Capote and Max Beerbohm. And he's downright fond of fixtures in his own life, from a favorite Chinese restaurant to his dad, a true adult who wore black socks and business shoes to the beach. Throughout, Epstein cuts the cantankerousness with wry humor and perceptive erudition. (Sept. 6)

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